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The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Fred R. Myers, ed. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2001. 366 pp.
As any reader of The Gift knows, Marcell Mauss was enchanted by the mystery of a particular type of material movement-the return, rearrival, and remembrance of past things. What compels the recipient of a gift to obligatorily reciprocate? What power resides in the object given that it causes its recipient to pay back the giver? As one finishes the conversation among Annette Weiner, Fred Myers, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett about the analytic distinctions among perishability, permanence, and durability, one realizes that The Empire of Things is not simply the written results of a School of American Research (SAR) Advanced Seminar on material culture and exchange theory but is a gift to Weiner as well. Over the course of this very human, lightly edited, exchange, the reader sees that only a certain amount of what has been given can return. But that this does not necessarily diminish life. Durability emerges as the best that humans as material beings can hope for, and keeping something durable requires the love of labor.
The history The Empire of Things tracks is remarkably ambitious, attempting as it does, to cast exchange theory, art, and material culture into one field of vision. At first glance, the collection threatens to unravel into a set of topics bound by nothing more than the cover, since not all essays are on art, not all of the art essays are on exchange, and at least one chapter (by Claudio Lomnitz) is not about art or exchange so much as about the political culture of human relics. And, yet, the book is held together by two shared sympathies that make the collection vital reading in social anthropology. Most of the chapters are motivated by the spirit of Weiner's concept of "inalienable possessions" and its centrality to the analysis of capitalism: that there are a range of objects and aspects of subjects that...